Computing devices have long supported various editing actions such copy, cut and paste. A copy action is generally performed after a user has selected some displayed content, and results in the selected content being copied to a temporary storage commonly referred to as a clipboard. A paste action is generally performed when a user desires to insert previously-copied content elsewhere, and results in the previously-copied content in a clipboard being inserted at a user-specified location. A cut action may be considered to be a sub-type of a copy action, as like a copy action, a cut action causes selected content to be copied to a clipboard. However, with a cut action, the selected content is then deleted from its original location.
Copy, cut and paste actions are commonly used in word processing applications, for example, to manipulate text, images and other types of content in a word processing document. Copy, cut and paste actions, however, are also used for a wide variety of other purposes, including manipulating files in a storage system. Furthermore, since the advent of multitasking and the support of multiple simultaneously-executing applications, copy, cut and paste actions have been used to copy or move content between different applications. For example, if a user finds an interesting item when browsing the web and wishes to share that item with another user via email or text message, the user may need to copy the item in a browser application and paste it into an email or text messaging application. Likewise, if a user encounters a geographical location in a web page or in an email and wishes to view that location on a map, the user may need to copy the item from a browser or email application and paste it into a search box of a map application.
Copying or cutting content such as text from one application and pasting that content into a different application, however, can be laborious in many computing devices, particularly mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets where windowing is not used for applications (i.e., only one application is displayed at a time). On a mobile device, for example, a user wishing to copy text from one application to another application may require the user to first select the text by tapping and/or dragging on a touchscreen display to select the desired text and select a copy user control that performs the copy action. Then, in order to paste that copied text into a different application, the user may be required to press a home button on the computing device, scroll through a list of applications and find the desired application to paste into, and then paste the text into an appropriate user control (e.g., a search box, message box, text box, etc.). In some cases, a user may even have delete some text after pasting (e.g., when pasting into the search box of a map application to properly format the query).